Welcome to Parlick Class 2023!

Mrs Robinson, Mrs Davis and Mrs Robison are the adults who teach, guide and care for us in the Reception Class (Foundation Stage). Miss Middleton and Mrs Weyer also help in the afternoons.

Here are some of the things we have got up to so far this year. Please scroll further down the page to see our weekly updates.

In Parlick Class we are busy everyday exploring, learning and developing new skills, primarily through play-based activities. We  encourage children to be curious and independent by providing an enriching and nurturing environment.

Early maths

Whilst a lot of maths involves numbers, it is important that children know how to use numbers in a variety of contexts and have an understanding of number that goes deeper than just rote counting. In Reception we use the NCETM government scheme along side further Shape, Space and Measure lessons. With lots of links to CBeebies ‘Numberblocks,’ the children love the activity-based approach and develop a thorough and deep understanding of how numbers can be built, used and manipulated. More information can be found here:

https://www.ncetm.org.uk/in-the-classroom/early-years/

Phonics

We start each day with a short phonics session. Phonics is a method that teaches reading and writing by using the 44 pure sounds, or phonemes, of the English language. At St. Wilfrid’s we use a program called Red Rose Letters and Sound and we will start by introducing the children to the sounds on the image below, the majority of which are known as Phase 2 sounds. As we learn to recognise and say more sounds, we will practise blending them together to read words, and segmenting them to write words. This will start off with simple consonant-vowel-consonant words such as c-a-t. Once the children are ready, we will move onto Phase 3 sounds which includes digraphs and  trigraphs (when two/three letters make up one sound such as ‘ch’). We also teach the children to read Phase 2, 3 and 4 tricky words – words that can’t be phonetically sounded out such as ‘the’.We continue to make references to phonics constantly throughout the day, for example, asking children to help sound out words when following recipe cards in our mud kitchen.

Curriculum

In Reception we have designed a rich, varied curriculum based on the principles outlined in the 2020 Development Matters document. Our curriculum is text based with a carefully selected reading spine that ensures children are exposed to a wide variety of cultures, ideas, stories and vocabulary. Each term we have a core theme from which we choose our Super Six books – a fairytale, a rhyming or repeated refrain book, a diversity book, a quality text that may introduce children to a new level of vocabulary, a wellbeing book and a miscellaneous book that we know the children will love. We focus on a book a week and centre our adult focussed learning on this. Within provision, children are also free to explore their own interests and ideas.

Please follow these links to view our Long Term Plan, which highlights the learning for each term, and our Progression Document that details what skills and knowledge children are expected to know after each half term.

Reception long term plan

St. Wilfrid’s Reception Progression of learning

Welly Wednesdays

We are so lucky to have fantastic grounds at our school, so every Wednesday we make the most of them and outside for the afternoon. We have a class set of wellies and waterproof coats and trousers for the children to wear and we enjoy all sorts of activities on our school field, in our nature area or sheltered in our outdoor classroom. We usually finish with some delicious hot chocolate. Here’s some of the things we have got up to:

Summer 1 Term

This term our topic is Growing in Our World. Take a look at our topic map to see what we will be learning about: Growing our world topic map 2023

Summer 1 Week 

We started by looking at our Talk Basket for this term which had things in it all about our world. We then decided to visit a travel agents (in our role play area) and booked a trip to somewhere in our world. We all pretended to board the flight whilst Passport Control checked our tickets, then the flight attendants helped us to our seats, showed us the safety videos and handed out snacks. It was lots of fun and the children have enjoyed continuing this in our airport role play area.

We have been reading Somebody Swallowed Stanley and learning about how rubbish can be very dangerous for wildlife, so we have had lots of sea life activities for the children to do, and we created posters to tell people not to drop litter. During our Welly Session we learnt about David Attenborough and became naturalists like him. We started our Tadpole Diaries before going on a litter hunt around the school grounds. We have also been continuing our work on doubles in maths and have been looking at making darker and lighter shades of colours in the art area.